Chasing the Wind 7

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Chasing the Wind, Episode seven, and then you die. It's the problem you cannot solve. Death is at nearly one of Hugh's complaints. Death is the wrecking ball that knocks down every answer. He's tried to find enoughness. So take out your calendar. What's on it? Dentist lunch Thursday, I need to do this podcast interview, pick up the dry cleaning, got to wash clothes, granddaughter's birthday meeting at ten, vacation in September or all change, dinner with the Johnsons. And then there's another appointment on your calendar. You don't know the date, you can't cancel it, you can't reschedule, and strangely, you've made absolutely no plans for what happens afterwards. Q has Actually that's not quite right. Q has obsessed over it. He's grown wrinkle on his forehead. Welcome to Gospel and Podcast and Doctor Bill Senor YouTube channel. I'm your host, Doctor Bill Senored. We are free wherever you get good podcast and of course on YouTube as well, so please subscribe. One of the fastest ways you can help us grows by leaving your comments below. Thank you sincerely for that. Also, thanks for making Gospel and Podcast one of the top ten percent in the world and top sixty Christian podcast in Colorado. Thank you for listening every week. We hope it helps regularly to hear about God's love for the unlovable, unloved, unlovely, unworthy, and unlikely. And that's all of us on any given day. That's you, that's me. Yeah, I want to get right into this. After a brief word from our sponsors, I'll be right back. So Q discovers the great equalizer. Q compares wisdom and folly, and surely wisdom wins, and Q acknowledges wisdom better than folly. A wise person can see where he's going. A fool walks around in darkness well great biblical with some wins, except Q notices something quote the same fate overtakes them both close quote. The wise man dies, the fool dies, and Q seems almost offended. I spent my entire life becoming wise, he says, and that guy and I have the same ending. Imagine spending forty years earning degrees, studying philosophy, making wise decisions. And the village idiot's grave is six feet deep, two Q says, and what's the advantage the eutron. That's not nihilism, that's just a really good question. Death keeps ruining everything. Let's do a review q's experiment. So far, he's been a busy little beaver. Here pleasure wonderful. Then you die money useful, Then you die success impressive. Then you die wisdom better than foolishness. But you die legacy. Finally, something survives me, except somebody else gets it. Then you die. Death is Cue's annoying friend who keeps showing up at at every party. Hey, great vineyard, Q, thank you, you're gonna die. Could you leave nice house? Thank you? Somebody else will own it. Seriously, that's the emotional architecture of Ecclesiastes. Death doesn't merely end life for Q. Death reaches backward and threatens the meaning of everything that came before it. You know photo boxes. I'm gonna make this, oh maybe painfully recognizable. You clean out your parents' house and there's a box of photographs. You recognize mom, dad, grandpa. Then wait, there's people in the pictures you don't recognize. A wedding, three people by a lake, a soldier, a baby, somebody carefully saved these pictures for selny years. You turn one over and nothing's written on it, so nobody knows who they are. You ask your brothers and sisters, they don't know, And eventually somebody says, should we keep things? That's cue? See it's not were these people's lives valuable? But where did it all go? Their loves, arguments, Christmases, worries, dreams, Monday mornings, connections with your family, with your parents, your grandparents or great grandparents, the thing they thought would ruin their lives in nineteen forty eight, nineteen thirty, it's all gone. Qces that and says helll foolishes, substanceless, and for a moment it's difficult to argue with him. Well, our culture has an interesting solution. We mostly don't talk about death. We hide it. We try to bury it under the rug hospitals, funeral homes, euphemisms. He passed, we lost her, and then we returned to Netflix. Our ancestors lived with death. We outsource it, which allows us to maintain the strangest illusion. Everybody dies except me. I mean intellectually, of course, I know I'm mortal, but practically check my Amazon cart, I'm clearly planning to be here a while. And that's funny, that's poignant, that's sad, that's human. Underneath all of that is something important. Most of us organize our lives around something we know isn't true, that there will always be more time. Well, Q refuses to play along. It bothers him. Is that thing in his head that he can't get out, And that's one of the things I actually admire about him. Christians do something even stranger. We believe something absolutely outrageous, not metaphorically, not sentimentally. We claim death isn't the end of me, Resurrection eternal life, do creation and inheritance that cannot perish life. With Christ we say it every Easter, we preach it at funerals, we sing about it, and then Monday morning comes and we largely forget. We're immortal. It's true, and yet we largely forget it. And that's fascinating. We get back into this frantic motion about temporary things or reputation, bank balance, arguments, bodies, relationships, careers, whether somebody appreciated what I did, whether my book sells, whether the kids remember everything I taught them, whether my accomplishments last, and the disciple eventually has to say, wait, I already have a lasting legacy, not one I've created, but one I've inherited. But I got to keep telling myself that, I got to keep thinking about that moment. I'm going to look into Jesus's face, the Father, the Spirit, and I'll see his joy, his delight, and I'll go this is wholeness. Q's question finally gets an answer his member. His obsession is what is utron? What is left over? What's the lasting game? What survives all my hard work by a mall? Q keeps looking under the sun, and death keeps answering nothing you can hold on to. But the Christian story introduces something q's experiment cannot discover empirically, as resurrection. Suddenly Q's question becomes breathtaking. What survives death? You do not because you finally cracked the code, not because your achievements became permanent, not because your children kept your name alive, not because somebody named a building after you, but because Jesus Christ walked out of a grave and promised to bring you with him. That's utron that Q couldn't manufacture. And here's the crucial good enough Christian type move your eternal significance isn't your final accomplishment. It's Christ's accomplishment given to you. It's his relationship with Him that's permanent, that gives value and identity, not all of this other stuff which could be enjoyable. But this has to major overall of it. And we can get there through the Holy Spirit's power. If HESI is three fourteen to twenty one, Through the Holy spirits, through the God's power, through the Holy Spirit and your inner being, you can begin to grasp what heaven is going to be like the height and width and LinkedIn depth of the love of Christ, the fullness of the fullness of the Father. And that's the right answer, and we can see it in the Disciples answer at the end of the book. We'll get there. All of this is as asking the question that has no answer here on planet Earth, but its ultimate answer is in heaven. Paul answers it, and I think one fifteen belongs here. Paul spends an entire chapter on resurrection, then he ends somewhere surprising work. Then he ends somewhere surprising work. Therefore he says, stand firm, always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord. Why and here comes the line that almost sounds written directly across Ecclesiastes quote, because you know your labor and the Lord is not in vain. It's almost like he's dialoguing with Cohelat. So the labor that you do alongside of the Lord is not empty, not feudal, not wasted, not havevel. You know, I'm not claiming that he's deliberately quoting Ecclesiastes, but maybe the theological collision, though stanning Back is magnificent. Here's a made up conversation, Q, what gain is there from all my labor? Paul, Resurrection changes the answer because death doesn't get the final word anymore. Yeah, is that what we believe? So yeah, someone else is going to eventually get Grandpa's air friar, and the house and the tools. The clothes are going to go to goodwill. His office belongs to somebody else. The name eventually disappears from the company directory. And that's okay because Grandpa's eternal life was never stored in his garage. His inheritance was somewhere death couldn't reach, which means I don't need my stuff to remember me forever. And when I get that, when my subconscious gets that through the Holy spirits working reward my brain. That's freedom. So remember I said, there's really three voices. There's coheleat, there's the father at the end, and his son the disciple. If you will, he or she's been listening to Q, and Q says, quote, everything I build will suddenly belong to someone else, and the the young disciple thinks true. The wise die like fools. True. Eventually I'm forgotten, probably true, therefore havevel And now the disciple hesitates. Maybe Q's observations are right, but his conclusions only work if death is the end of the story. And what if it isn't. That's the crack opening in Q's entire system. So someday someone else will sleep in your bedroom, someone else will own your house, Your job will belong to someone else, Your possessions will scatter. Your grandchildren's grandchildren may not know your name. You will not be there to care, because if Christ was right, and he is, you will be very much alive and whole and satisfied and enough, and perhaps discovering that the things you were so frightened of losing weren't your inheritance in the first place. Q doesn't get there. Q is terrified that death makes everything temporary. You know, the Gospel doesn't deny the temporary. It gives the temporary an eternal horizon. And let me in with this. You don't have to leave an eternal legacy. Jesus does that, and he already left you one, and he already left it for your kids and grandkids and great grandkids. That's the important point. Well, then the wind returns. He can't see that, he can't discern that he's still under the sun, and that's where he's limited his investigation. And by the way, I do too every day. But he's just discovered something else that doesn't make sense. If God is just, why is the world so unfair? Whosh? Good people suffer, crooked people, prosper courts or corrupt power winds, and sometimes doing the right thing seems to make your life worse. Yeah, what's next, I'll let you know after this brief word from our sponsors. Well, I've been sharing about my latest book, good Enough. Christian is getting great reviews. It's up for a couple of awards. It's for you, Christian. If you're worried about having disappointed Jesus, if your Christian walk isn't what you had hoped it would be. If you're not experiencing the delight of the Father, aware of the Father dancing over you, rejoicing over you, saying over you, at a boy, at a girl, You're my beloved son with whom I'm well pleased, all because of Christ. Don't get me wrong. But if you're not experiencing that, if you're just kind of mustling through on your own, trying to do the right things in order to earn that good enough, Christianity says, stop it. You can't earn it. You never could. Jesus already earned it. It's actually bad theology, and you can begin to experience it if you're ready to ask what does the love of God actually feel like? The book will tell you. And by the way, that's the right question. Well, thanks for listening to my series Chasing the Win Next time? Why do bad people win? Yeah? He was about to ask one of the few questions that can make even people who believe in God wonder what exactly is he doing? Yeah, but remember he was not the whole story. We'll see you next time. Take heart, child of God.